Foresteppe - Karaul (2019)

In the early days of Klammklang, Egor Klochikhin played a pivotal role in establishing our intentions to create an experiment-friendly musical platform and quickly became one of the label's defining artists. Following various multiple releases, installation and exhibition works, Egor has returned to Klammklang to release the new conceptual album Karaul, his first record in the label in over the last four years.

Sound-wise, Karaul is set to represent Foresteppe's recent musical styles evolved out of the label's back catalogue highlights – a conceptual tape collage Kosichkin Tapes (Klamm05) made up of pieces, splices, and overlapping layers of half-anonymous Soviet-era home recordings, and his solo masterpiece Diafilms (Klamm08) featuring Egor's trademark post-folk sound. Nevertheless, Karaul goes beyond what one might expect from Foresteppe's album, combining a vast palette of drones and noises with some brushstrokes of power electronics, martial industrial and even meticulously deconstructed club music shaded by the artist's more accustomed tools: acoustic guitar, tape machines, all sorts of toy pianos, pipes, horns and other implements of previously usual freaky electroacoustic ambience. This archeo-modern musical shape of things that came was inspired by Egor's solitary instance of mandatory military service – a rather traumatic experience commonly spread among many Russian young men.

The word 'karaul' designates both a kind of pompous sentry, mundane army guarding duty, and bitterly humorous call for help in horrific cases along. All of these meanings rhyme perfectly with the motto of Strategic Missile Forces, Egor’s former service troops: "После нас – тишина" (‘Après nous, le silence’). But the silence appearing here is not only the silence of ashen wastes covering the Earth's surface after a missile strike. It's also the inner, personal silence in lack of emotions to the bunk neighbour in barracks; it's the silence of thousands souls and bodies stomped the parade ground before. It's the silence of imaginary presence of military Golden Age – a failed fiction of propaganda forces, whose inability of chaining the individuals into the ruthless machine still works even in traumatising situations of what one might call a separated male brotherhood.

It was told once to the protagonist in Masaki Kobayashi’s Ningen no jōken: ‘A brave man will always find a kindred spirit’. However, what if this spirit could not be found in the circle of obliged? The time starts to run into the joint again; a brave man begins to search the weapon against victimisation in mind of his own and minds long gone. Karaul stands for this exact matter. Think of it as of a field journal of non-inclusion into enclosed repressive system and guide of non-alignment in ‘the more you think, the worse grows fear’ circumstances.